I’ve always sort of loved the phrase of praise about an author one loves that you “even read their grocery lists”as if even there you’d find some JoycI’ve always sort of loved the phrase of praise about an author one loves that you “even read their grocery lists”as if even there you’d find some Joycean-type genius to glean or at least to simply be basking in their handwritten lettering. If Annie Ernaux is an author who you would—hell, I probably have—say this sort of thing about then you are in luck because Look at the Lights, My Love is Ernaux’s diary-like reflections on supermarkets and does, in fact, contain some shopping lists (coffee and cat food, if you were curious). Ernaux reflects back on the emergence of supermarkets—her first being in the London suburbs in the 1960s—and considers the social implications that come with such behemoths of consumerism over the course of two years that she keeps records of her thoughts while shipping in an Auchan. While it is always a delight to read the way she decodes the world, much of this feels a bit dated having been published in 2014 and only now translated into English by Alison L. Strayer, though this also goes to show how much the world has changed even in a decade and how normalized the concept of a superstore is. Anything Ernaux is always worth a read, and at 96 pages this is a fun little jaunt through her mind.
Growing up, superstores were just a normal part of American consumerism and never really seemed to stand out much for me. In Michigan we have Meijer which got its start here, as well as the usual Targets and Walmarts, so it was interesting to see Ernaux address them as something unique and worth dissecting. She begins her book, however, discussing that she feels superstores (okay, I also feel like nobody here ever uses the term superstore and just says the corporate name which is likely an indication on the US being so completely saturated by corporations capitalisming their way into every single nook and cranny of society) never get literary representation, which she theorizes is actually an erasure of women’s livelihoods.
‘the supermarket is linked to subsistence, the business of women, who have long been its main users. And that which falls within the domain of activities more or less specific to women is traditionally invisible, does not count-like the domestic work they perform, moreover. That which has no value in life has none in literature.’
This was interesting to consider as I feel supermarkets have become backdrops for a lot of literature in the US, most notably Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where a character claims a supermarket ‘recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it's a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It's full of psychic data,’ that supermarkets are full of ceremonial behavior, ‘code words and ceremonial phrases.’ Supermarkets can serve an excellent vantage point into the undercurrent of society and these moments of reflection in Look at the Lights… is when the book is at its best. Over the two years, Ernaux has a few interesting points to consider. She writes about the value judgements, such as warnings about shoplifting in the alcohol section but not the vegetables. Or she writes about how consumerism gets tangled up in ideas of showing affection:
‘In the world of the superstore and the free-market economy, loving children means buying them as many things as possible’
Basic reflections on class:
‘The humiliation inflicted by commercial goods: they are too expensive, so I'm worth nothing.’
Or her ongoing disdain for the self-checkout and being yelled at by a robotic voice over any errors she makes:
‘On the internet I read that the scanning device is called a gun, and that consumers claim to be satisfied with the system, with the weapon that eliminates cashiers while at the same time turning us over to the discretionary authority of the superstore. A simple political act: refuse to use it.’
She does not engage much with the staff or customers though, saying ‘I am unable to step outside my status of customer.’
I do enjoy the line she had about how if you accidentally steal something by error at a self-checkout it doesn’t feel as bad because it’s just a machine. During college my roommate and I read Les Miserables at the same time and started a running inside-joke where we’d steal a single baguette through the self-checkout and declare on our way out of the store “tonight we eat like Jean Valjean”.
Ultimately, there isn’t much here for this to really need to be published as a standalone book beyond Yale University Press just wanting to put out anything Ernaux they had rights to following her winning the Nobel Prize in 2022, but it was still a plesant read. I love when she discusses topics of memory and retrospective investigation, which is probably why these reflections done in the moment don’t capture the same magic and even she admits ‘I have trouble discerning and comprehending the present moment.’ Though her note at the end when she ceases to diary about the supermarket is classic Ernaux:
‘As I do every time I cease to record the present, I feel I am withdrawing from the movement of the world, giving up not only narrating my days, but seeing them too. Because seeing in order to write is to see in a different way. It means to distinguish objects, individuals, and mechanisms, and give their existence value.’
This was a fun little read, and I certainly thought about it today while grocery shopping, passing through all the different sections of the superstore and reflecting more about them than I had before. Ernaux is such a gem, and I will continue to read anything she writes. Even her grocery lists....more
The women in Mieko Kawakami’s work tend to function as an expression of the effects on society at the intersection between capitalism and patriarchy, The women in Mieko Kawakami’s work tend to function as an expression of the effects on society at the intersection between capitalism and patriarchy, moving like a specter of anxiety through a world that becomes increasingly threatening. Chandelier, a short story by Mieko Kawakami, focuses the author’s incisive gaze on a department store and the siren call of glitz and glamor that ensnare people in a sort of beauty industrial complex where women’s lives are as if for display purpose only. This short story was single bound for the 2022 Independent Bookstore Day, a promotional material for the release of All the Lovers in the Night (a fantastic novel) that included the short story as well as an interview with translators Sam Bett and David Boyd, and was quite the excellent find. While brief, the story is a succinct left-hook of Kawakami’s signature themes and dives directly into oppression of self-image in a patriarchal society and deteriorating mental health, particularly in relation to the loss of the narrator’s mother. Sharp and sinister, this story strikes fast and leaves you chilled.
This story feels particularly akin to Kawakami’s Breast and Eggs, demonstrating the social conditioning that has women spending their money on beauty and external self-image. The narrator here has unexpectedly come into a large wealth due to royalties from a job she did years ago, a sudden windfall after the death of a mother and a lifetime of barely making ends meet. She spends her entire time in a department store, watching all the shiny products calling out to customers. Kawakami quickly plunges us into a dark space, with consumerism taking on a sinister tone and into a place where image is all that women seem afforded in life. Adorning one’s body with the latest fashion, the best make-up, and even beauty surgeries, become the one aim of the lives trapped in this retail purgatory. The narrator’s social media only furthers this, filled with young women defining themselves by their appearance. ‘The natural beauties--those with no need for surgery--sit at the top of the hierarchy,’ she reflects, ‘but even they have nothing but respect for the girls who go under the knife to win their beauty.’ We see an older woman, immaculately dressed, who talks about how her husband keeps her daughter with his money out of not wanting her to marry and give another family an outlet to his money. She is to be polished and kept on the mantle of society like a trophy.
The surface image wears thin in this sort of life. Dressed up and wealthy, the narrator doesn’t feel happy and wishes every day for the brilliant chandelier hanging in the department store to fall and kill her. She fantasizes death with every purchase, abrupt, violent, dramatic death. Consumption of fine things doesn’t satisfy a life, clothes don’t make a person and no amount of money can bring an absent mother back from the dead.
‘God, what a joke. These shoes, those shoes. These heels and those heels. It was too stupid to call them the same thing. Nothing made any sense. Not the meaningless shiny floor, or the fact that somebody was smiling, breathing, walking, had color, could see…or these shopping bags…or the fact that one person was living while someone else was dead. Every single thing was so unbelievably stupid.’
The narrator invents a life with a mother she never had, falls apart, lashes out at the world. It comes as a surprise but with every sentence we feel the narrator’s mind coiling with tension and anxiety, ready to strike. The emotional outpouring and emptiness at the end of the story felt so authentic and successfully done, and I am always in awe how well Kawakami can navigate the seas of changing and tumultuous emotional states.
This stand-alone short story makes me hope there is a short story collection on the way. Kawakami does have quite a few from what I've read, it would be lovely to see them all bound together in translation. I have certainly become a major fan of Mieko Kawakami and I hope there is many more translations of her work on the way.
‘It is not only great works of art that are born out of suffering and doubt.’
Do we allow ourselves to be tricked into substituting simple pleasures an‘It is not only great works of art that are born out of suffering and doubt.’
Do we allow ourselves to be tricked into substituting simple pleasures and convenience for authentic reality? Do we willingly allow ourselves to be submissive pawns in a game of corporate and political control? Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s The Cave is an enlightening examination of Plato’s allegory of the cave as he depicts a natural world shrinking away as the cheap, plastic reign of a compartmentalized authoritative control casts its shadow across the land. The Cave chronicles the struggles and strife of the kind hearted Algor family, who find themselves in a difficult place when the powerful capital city The Center ceases purchasing their hand-crafted pottery, choosing instead to stock their shelves with plastic dining sets that are cheaper to mass produce, and are bound by a contract forbidding any dealer to the Center, past or present, from selling to anyone else. Saramago harnesses his marvelous poetic wit to make the readers hearts ache for the Algor family, and the plight of manual laborers as their livelihood is threatened by ominous forces that place profit and power over quality and general well-being. The political climate in The Cave creates a perfect breeding ground for a discussion of Plato’s Forms, with Saramago focusing his sights everywhere from plastic plates, police states, and language in order to examine the way we trade the authentic for cheap imitations and replicas.
All of Saramago’s classic motifs are immediately recognizable in The Cave, such as obdurate authoritative forces chasing the common man out of the light; menacing capital cities operating through an elaborate, yet faulty, chain of command; musings on the nature of a Creator; and his brilliant, signature style of blending dialogue into his dense paragraphs of meandering prose. For the uninitiated, Saramago doesn’t break up dialogue in the traditional sense, but instead allows multiple voices to blend into one continuous stream separated only by commas and a capitalized first letter to denote a new speaker. This reinforces his perspective that his stories aren’t of the individual, but of the collective voices and hearts of all humanity, inseparable from the natural world around them. His books are the voice of existence, flowing and unscarred by the borders of ego, asking us to seek freedom and happiness in collective equality and cooperation instead of a competition where those who have assert their dominance through force and fear. The Center becomes the focal point for his admonition against authoritarianism. It is like a grey concrete tumor of commercialism swelling outward and destroying the green countryside, accumulating power and wealth as it tightens its grip of authority and dominerence over the rural manual laborers. Saramago mocks the bureaucratic structure of The Center, viewing it as an unnecessarily complex web that is self-sufficient only by imposing its own authority down through the ranks.
…his position on the Center’s organization chart reminded him that the whole definition and maintenance of hierarchical configurations is based on their being scrupulously respected and never contravened or transgressed, and, of course, the inevitable result of being too free and easy with one’s inferiors or subalterns is to undermine respect and to encourage license, or, to put it more explicitly and unambiguously, it all ends in insubordination, indiscipline and anarchy
Plato used his allegory of the cave to further illustrate his concept of Forms, roughly speaking, a theory to address the problem of universals by asserting that Forms are the quality of reality, and that phenomena are shadowy interpretations of Form. Forms are atemporal and aspatial, but had distinct, individual qualities that are perceived in multiple ways when represented by objects. The cave allegory consists of people chained to the floor and forced to spend their lives watching shadows flicker across the back wall of the cave. They would perceive the shadows as reality and give names to them, when in fact they were just reproductions of the true reality. Saramago expertly meshes his admonitory themes of authoritarian force with Plato’s Forms to argue that we are becoming like the prisoners of the cave, trading the authentic for imitations. Saramago’s defense of manual laborers asserts that hand-crafted work born from sweat and blood is authentic and that the plastic, cheap mass produced plates are like shadows on the wall of a cave.
The ominous sight of those chimneys vomiting out columns of smoke makde him wonder which one of those hideous factories would be producing those hideous plastic lies, cunningly fashioned to look like earthenware.
The Center and it’s hub of consumerism is the reproduction of authentic living. People are compartmentalized into tiny apartments away from the sun, living shallow lives that are dictated to them by the endless list of Center laws and experience the natural world through sideshow attractions—such as a ride that simulates each of the seasons and drops fake rain and snow onto the visitors—that are reminiscent of George Saunders’ short fiction. Even power is seen as only assumed and created, keeping people submissive through emotions of fear and hopelessness. The Center offers safety from the dangers of rural life, making a large show of the way they fight back against the shantytowns that rob trucks en route to The Center. It may be possible, however, that the robberies are staged to simply give The Center a reasonable motive to send in the troops and further build a sense of security and fear.
The truck had not been burned by the people in the shacks, but by the police themselves, it was just an excuse to bring the army…he had suddenly seen what the world was like, how there are many lies and no truths, well, there must be some out there, but they are continually changing, and not only does a possible truth give us insufficient time to consider its merits, we also have to check first that this possible truth is not, in fact, a probable lie.
Saramago is a lover of words, and the heart of the marvelous allegorical clockwork of this novel is his examination of words and their relation to the world around us. ‘Words were born to play with each other,’ he writes, ‘they don’t know how to do anything else.’ In a manner reminiscent of both Jacques Derrida (of whom Saramago was associated with several times through both men’s activist actions), and Jorge Luis Borges (Saramago’s books are littered with allusions to the great author), Saramago explores the way words are merely shadows on the wall of reality. ‘Words, for example, which are not things, which merely designate things as best they can, and in doing so shape them…’ Saramago offers that the world of physical reality is experienced by putting our perceptions into words, but words are not the same tangible reality, and we must accept that they can only form imperfect representations regardless of how poetic and poignantly words can play with one another. While language is shown as another replica of Forms, it is through language that the mind can find a haven—language is the bridge through which we can glimpse true reality and meaning. By arranging words together into the magic of literature, we are able to point towards a deeper understanding and dig up the buried treasure of substantial meaning. Some read for pure enjoyment, some for escape, others to appreciate the aesthetics of linguistics organized onto a page like a painting on a canvas, and while each individual reader may take a different path through words, we all travel this path because it offers us a taste of our own personal heaven and a glimpse at overwhelming beauty.
The same method doesn't work for everyone, each person has to invent his or her own, whichever suits them best, some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters, Unless, Unless what, Unless those rivers don't have just two shores but many, unless each reader is his or her own shore, and that shore is the only shore worth reaching.
Saramago hints at the true beauty of literature and how one idea can be interpreted in multiple ways, each shaping or reaffirming what we hold most dear in our hearts. Words may only take meaning in the way they interplay with one another, but it is through a careful consideration of words that we are able to deduce a fountain of wealth that flows through the author. ‘What you call playing with words is just a way of making them more visible.’
One of the many aspects that continuously pull me back into Saramago’s enchanting pages is his loving attentiveness to words and the reader. Saramago approaches his story as if it were a living thing independent from himself, being both the narrator delivering the story, but also an observer and participant much like the reader themselves. In a manner much like Macedonio Fernández, Saramago questions the motives of his characters, chastises them for their actions, and presents them as if they were writing themselves into his pages. ‘If this demonstrably ill-natured assistant head of department were to have any kind of future in the story we have been following, we would probably eventually get around to asking him to explain what lay behind his feelings on that occasion…’ This helps to build a camaraderie and mutual respect with the reader as you feel he is sharing the journey along with you. I greatly enjoy his authorial interjections, a tactic that often bothers me with other authors but seems completely endearing with Saramago. He gives off such an innocent joy to be an integral part to the creation of a story and just can’t contain his excitement when he blurts out his commentary on the characters and story. Reading Saramago is akin to having a wise, caring grandfather rocking you to sleep in his arms while bestowing the secrets of the universe to you in an engaging bedtime tale. Many of the novels shortcomings are easily glossed over because the reader is so captivated by his soothing narrative voice. This novel occasionally dips dangerously close to oversentimentality and often feels a uneven, yet chastising it beyond mere mention seems malicious. It would be like insulting your own loving grandfather for his bedtime stories, which you know please him to tell as much as they please you to hear. Saramago’s narrative voice is comforting while still cutting to the core of matters with a razor sharp edge.
Despite the growing tumor of consumerism and authoritarianism, The Cave offers a bright beacon of hope. Ciprano Algor and his family bond together to create a new product, a line of clay figurines (his selection of figurines speaks volumes about the human race and our attraction to warfare and power, but I’ve blabbed on long enough and shouldn’t spoil the discovery for future readers), to sell to The Center. The creation process in the kiln opens up a channel for Saramago to examine the role of a Creator, and he openly chastises any Creator that would knowingly damn their creations.
He will not, like Marta, call them rejects, for to do so would be to drive them from the world for which they had been born, to deny them as his own work and thus condemn them to a final, definitive orphanhood.
Through caring, understanding, cooperation and hard-work, Saramago proposes a bright future. The son-in-law, Marcal, employee of The Center, finds his true purpose lies as a member of a family, a part of natural order as opposed to his imitation family as an employee to a company. At the end, we see that we must strive for the real instead imitation despite that the latter seems to be the easier way.
While The Cave is a wonderful allegory exploring Plato’s philosophy and the nature of language, it is not best suited as an introduction to Saramago. This book is best viewed as another glowing intersection for the themes that characterize Saramago’s fantastic oeuvre and would fall short without interpreting it through its interplay with his other novels. The book is creeps forward at a very leisurely pace, content to build its themes in authorial asides and intense investigations of mundane actions, which made it easy to set aside whereas other Saramago novels were impossible for me to put down once I'd been hooked. The Cave is a novel about exploring language and Form, not plot, and if you are patient there is an immense wealth of ideas to ponder and mull over that more than justify the effort. It is not a weak novel, but one simply best suited for those that already hold the wise Saramago as dear in their hearts. Of all his novels, this one shines as the most endearing as the way he presents the Algor family can be best described as a tender caress of words. Moving and heartfelt, yet slow and ponderous, Saramago brilliantly examines the way we trade the authentic for cheap imitation and begs us to not to be bound to the floor of a cave by consumerism and a willful submission to authority, but to be daring enough to step out from the cave and great the bright sun of our existence with open arms, an open mind, and goodwill towards all of mankind. 3.5/5
'[B]ut if ancient knowledge serves for anything, if it can still be of some use to modern ignorance, let us say softly, so that people don't laugh at us, that while there's life, there's hope.'...more
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